March 15, 2007

Microsoft 2007

This
is not patent related, but I feel an obligation to my readers to warn them away
from Microsoft Vista® and Office 2007. I've been using them for almost two
months, and rue the day I transferred to the new computer.

With Vista, Microsoft has created a bleeding edge of incompatibility for
other programs, as well as being full of minor annoyances for anyone used to
Windows XP. HP, for example, doesn't have printer drivers for its All-In-One
lines. The Vista IE 7 web browser forces me to manually log into all my web sites, even
though the XP version did not [yes, I know how to tweak the settings]. In other
words, Vista can't hold its cookies. Bottom
line is that the operating system (I've the Ultimate version) is sordidly buggy,
and should have never shipped. Hell, its screen savers crash the machine. The
user interface has a few niceties, but is dumber in allowing customization, and
remembering custimizations, than XP. My Vista machine has a quad-core Intel
processor with 4GB memory, and Vista runs notably slower than XP on a much
slower processor. In sum, there is next to nothing to recommend Vista.

Office 2007 is inscrutably confusing. Its new ribbons, in lieu of toolbars, demonstrate
Microsoft's inept user interface design skills, whatever usability tests it
conducted be damned. I've found very little improvement in Office 2007, but
plenty of detraction. Stay away from Office 2007.

One positive note: Microsoft's OneNote (including the 2007 version) is wonderful for organizing
free-format pages. I use it to track my work matters, and it works quite well.
Highly recommended for keeping organized notes.